An increasing number of applications today make use of digital media for various purposes including, for example, remote business meetings via video conferencing, high definition video entertainment, video advertisements, and sharing of user-generated videos. As technology is evolving, users have higher expectations for media quality and, for example, expect high resolution video even when transmitted over communications channels having limited bandwidth.
To permit transmission of digital media streams while limiting bandwidth consumption, a number of video compression schemes have been devised, including formats such as VPx, promulgated by Google, Inc. of Mountain View, California, and H.264, a standard promulgated by ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/TEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), including present and future versions thereof. H.264 is also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 or MPEG-4 AVC (formally, ISO/TEC 14496-10).
One type of media transmission includes real-time encoding and transmission, in which the receiver of a media stream decodes and renders media data (i.e. video frames) as it is received. For example, in a real-time video implementation, if video is encoded at a bitrate greater than the available bandwidth of the networks over which it is to be transmitted, portions of the encoded video stream may not be able to be received and decoded by the receiver in real-time.